Jamal Khashoggi and journalists named TIME Person of the Year

TIME magazine has chosen “The Guardians and the War on Truth,” a group of journalists who have been in the news in 2018, as its Person of the Year.

The group includes Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was killed at the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul this fall. Also named were the reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters journalists who were arrested late last year in Myanmar while they were working on stories about the killings of Rohingya Muslims, a minority population in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

TIME also included Maria Ressa, the chief executive of the Philippines news website Rappler. She was indicted last month on tax evasion charges — a case that free speech and civil liberties advocates have warned is part of a wider crackdown on dissent by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.

And rounding out the group is the Capital Gazette, the Annapolis, Maryland newspaper that lost five employees this summer during a mass shooting.

“In its highest forms, influence—the measure that has for nine decades been the focus of TIME’s Person of the Year—derives from courage. Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.,” said Edward Felsenthal, Editor-in-Chief of TIME magazine. “They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.”

The magazine says President Donald Trump was named as runner up for Person of the Year.